


Boulevarde du Montparnasse

by piecesofalice



Category: Paris Enquêtes Criminelles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-02
Updated: 2010-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofalice/pseuds/piecesofalice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire Savigny likes to take her coffee on Blvd du Montparnasse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boulevarde du Montparnasse

\--

  
Claire Savigny likes to take her coffee on Blvd du Montparnasse. A cafe au lait, some sourdough toast and a well-neglected book, she stares at the people flooding this tourist trap and pays through the nose for the pleasure.

  
Her favourite time is Saturday mornings, when parades of tourists fall into groups like school children, when lovers meet for their first breakfasts or last, when people watching is so much more enjoyable because they all seem so free. The sounds of a million different accents flood towards her ears, and she holds them within her brain like a sponge because she likes accents and how they are so identifiable in such an anonymous city.

  
An American yankee yells at his wife, over the cobblestones; there's a touch of Australian and New Zealander, the harsh tang of Mandarin, the smooth bitter round of her cafe au lait at her lips and she smiles.

  
She has lived in Paris her entire life, taught to despise tourists and peddlers who ogle the city she took for granted because she was concieved and birthed within its city walls. When she was eighteen, she went to university and for the first time, saw past the technicolour dream of viva la France and the Savigny's perfect, Parisian world. She saw a damaged humanity within the entire globe that stole her breath; that taught her to breathe again when the debilitating sameness of her family was so stifling.

  
Books on books lined the walls of her tiny one bedroom flat. In the bathroom, she had year-old copies of _Elle_ and _Vogue_ to read in the bath because she felt Dickens and Chaucer deserved much better than a soiling in bathwater, and catalogues filled with things she didn't need were stacked high in the kitchen after being rescued from her mailbox and given priority over her ludicrous gas bill and a letter from her university roommate.

  
She ordered a state-of-the-art skillet over the phone while cooking with her old one, because it connected her to someone other than Revel and dead bodies for a couple of minutes a day.

  
Her hands touch her face as the waiter comes to her table and demands to know if she wants another cafe au lait. Claire orders a double-strength latte, while watching an American mother pose with her tiny daughter for a picture and a memory that passes as quickly as it came. Quickly, an image of her own mother comes into her mind, and goes out again without a scar because her relationship with the highly strung matriarch of her family is picture perfect in all the ways that it should be and in all the ways that it's not.

  
She started coming here on Saturday mornings when her job took her from a rookie to a detective. Every single one of her old haunts were now tainted by case files and her mobile phone chirping off at her, by late nights where her brain would start to fog with too many facts and too little pieces that fit, and she would physically hurt. The booze was given up in favour of caffeine, her life in favour of a career - but still, this was the one part of her that felt she was helping this melancholy world one wacko at a time.

  
Revel would join her, sometimes. Rake his hands through his hair, fidget and get distracted by bar maids and the tits of young misses drinking champagne and strawberries. Then he'd disappear, and she'd be alone, and that part of her that was repressed seemed to take over so she'd shuffle home to her white-walled bedroom and stare at the ceiling like it had all the answers.

  
Claire didn't feel satisfied in her life, but she puts this down to the chop-and-change of her existance and the unbalanced factors of such a vast and uncomprehensable world. Always. And if she ever felt alone, she just stared down at the cobblestones and clutched at the strength she got from spending her coffee time with complete strangers.

  
She's trying to read "Atlas Shrugged", in English, but the pages are marked with sour jam and brown caffeine scars from overreading and she wonders if she should invest in the complete works of Sherlock Holmes. There's a small bookshop down a side lane two streets away, but the pull of the sun and the laughing American family is too much, so she places her bookmark and closes her book in favour of the street scenes in front of her.

  
She likes to take her coffee on Blvd du Montparnasse, because it's Saturday morning and it's hers alone.

  
\---

_Fin._

\---


End file.
